Introduction
When in 1955 Adorno proclaimed “all opera is Orpheus” in a lecture, he emphasized the central significance of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydike for the development of the genre opera.
Orpheus as the hero, who manages to get entrance to the underworld through the power of his voice/singing to win back his lost bride Eurydike, has been in the centre of European Opera Tradition for 400 years.
But at the same time this classic “sujet”, this archetype of an opera has been at the cradle of new forms of opera. At the important turning points of the history of the history of the opera Orpheus climbs out of the depths of the myth, to claim victory with his music over the aesthetic “death” of this sometimes formal, fossilized genre: From Jacapo Peris “Euridice” and Claudio Monteverdis “Orfeu”, over Rossis and Telemanns “Orpheus” up to Glucks “Orfeu ed Euridice”.
Overall, in this process the role of the Gluck opera cannot be too over estimated, as it stands for one of the most important musical revolutions in the whole European History of Operas. With his for his time avantgardistic composition “Orfeu ed Euridice” Gluck had released this genre of its recitative monopole and introduced a singing, which we usually nowadays seize as classical European “Opera singing”.
With this in the context of Glucks opera history “Orfeu ed Euridice” it is a symbol of innovation and creative use of aesthetic tradition and its conventions.
So, we choose this work as a draft for our project with the intention to let the classical opera come up on the terrain of the modern media art, and through that work out the perspectives of this genre under the aspect of today’s medial determined cultural situation under an artistic aspect.
The choice of just this classical subjet enabled us to develop a visual metaphor, which stands as a symbol of the human relation to the digitally produced world. What looks at a first glance as purely superficial, turns out to be a projection of ourselves deep down inside. |
